Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

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SUBJECT: FUNDRAISING (90%); HEADS OF STATE & GOVERNMENT (90%); INVESTIGATIONS (90%); PHILANTHROPY (90%); STATE DEPARTMENTS & FOREIGN SERVICES (79%); INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (79%); WAR & CONFLICT (76%); PARAMILITARY & MILITIA (76%); REFUGEES (75%); DEATHS (74%); CAMPAIGN FINANCE (73%); BRIBERY (71%); ZOOS & AQUARIUMS (62%); HOSPITALS (55%); PRIME MINISTERS (90%); FOREIGN RELATIONS (89%); MARINE MAMMALS (84%)
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GEOGRAPHIC: BAGHDAD, IRAQ (90%); TAIPEI, TAIWAN (79%); CHICAGO, IL, USA (76%) NEW YORK, USA (92%); ILLINOIS, USA (76%) ISRAEL (96%); IRAQ (93%); RUSSIA (93%); UNITED STATES (92%); PAPUA NEW GUINEA (92%); TAIWAN (92%); CHILE (92%); GEORGIA (79%); CUBA (72%); ITALY (50%)
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The New York Times
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Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; TODAY IN BUSINESS; Pg. 2
LENGTH: 512 words
DOLLAR SHOWS SIGNS OF LIFE The dollar may be getting back on its feet after a six-year skid against the euro.

BETTING ON FANNIE MAE Fannie Mae, the buyer of home loans, reported a $2.57 billion quarterly loss, but investors bid the stock up 15 percent. [C1.]

PEAK PRICE PREDICTED Oil hit another record and the government said it expected gasoline prices to peak at a national average of $3.73 a gallon in June. [C1.]

NO LOVE LOST The decades-long feud between Alan C. Greenberg, the former chairman of Bear Stearns, and James E. Cayne, the man who wrested Bear from him, is reaching new heights as Bear prepares to be taken over by JPMorgan. [C1.]

BUILDING A NEW NETWORK A consortium of technology and telecommunications companies intends to build a new generation of nationwide wireless data networks. [C3.]

PROFIT DROPS AT LAZARD Lazard, the investment bank run by Bruce Wasserstein, said that its first-quarter profit fell 71 percent, hurt largely by a losses in its holdings of corporate debt and in its corporate equity portfolio. [C3.]

A GREEN COMMITMENT Consumer companies are working harder to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they are still a pretty carbon-intensive lot, a nonprofit group said. [C8.]

COUNTRYWIDE'S MISTAKES An official of Countrywide Financial, which is accused of inflating certain borrowers' fees, told a Senate panel that the company had made errors. [C2.]

BRIBERY TAKES A HIT A series of bribery investigations at leading European companies has helped to speed compliance with global anticorruption standards. [C8.]

TELECOM BID IN SOUTH AFRICA Two rival cellphone companies -- one from China, the other from India -- are squaring off to buy MTN Group, a leading South African telecommunications company. [C2.]

MAGIC KINGDOM Despite the weak economy, Walt Disney Company said that it saw no weakness in its theme park business, where quarterly operating income rose 33 percent. [C3.]

THE PERILS OF SPONSORSHIP The chief executive of Yum Brands, the sponsor of Saturday's Kentucky Derby, ended up in an awkward position just after the race, promoting the company while the filly Eight Belles was being euthanized. Advertising. [C8.]

BUILDING OWNERS' TOUGH TIMES Like many real estate companies, the Lightstone Group, which owns property in 45 states, is beginning to encounter debt-related problems as the economy weakens. [C4.]

MARKETS SHOW RESILIENCE Wall Street reversed early losses to close higher despite record high oil prices, as investors laid bets that the economy was in recovery mode. [C10.]

RECYCLING'S CHAMPIONGavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, is pushing his city to recycle more and more of its garbage. Part of the reason, a city official says, is that ''the No. 1 export for the West Coast of the United States is scrap paper.'' [A23.]

ICE CREAM ENTREPRENEUR DIES Irvine Robbins, who with his brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, started the Baskin-Robbins chain of ice cream stores -- together concocting quirky flavors like Pink Bubblegum -- died on Monday. He was 90. [A25.]

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SUBJECT: CONSUMER LENDING (90%); COMPANY LOSSES (90%); MORTGAGE BANKING & FINANCE (90%); OIL & GAS PRICES (89%); REAL ESTATE (89%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS (89%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS SECTOR PERFORMANCE (88%); WIRELESS TELECOMMUNICATIONS CARRIERS (88%); SPONSORSHIP (87%); MARKET OPEN CLOSE (84%); COMPANY PROFITS (77%); CORPORATE DEBT (77%); INVESTIGATIONS (77%); FINANCIAL RESULTS (77%); INTERIM FINANCIAL RESULTS (77%); INVESTMENT BANKING (77%); COMPANY EARNINGS (77%); EMISSIONS (76%); WIRELESS INDUSTRY (75%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (73%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES (73%); EURO (73%); GASOLINE PRICES (72%); FOOD INDUSTRY (72%); GASOLINE MARKETS (71%); BRIBERY (70%); HORSE RACING (66%); REAL ESTATE AGENTS (65%); CITIES (62%); THEME PARKS (62%); CITY GOVERNMENT (62%); MOBILE & CELLULAR TELEPHONES (50%); AMUSEMENT & THEME PARKS (62%)
COMPANY: FEDERAL NATIONAL MORTGAGE ASSOCIATION (FANNIE MAE) (93%); COUNTRYWIDE FINANCIAL CORP (73%); WALT DISNEY CO (65%); JPMORGAN CHASE & CO (58%); BEAR STEARNS COS INC (57%); YUM BRANDS INC (52%); CNINSURE INC (66%)
TICKER: FNM (NYSE) (93%); CFC (NYSE) (55%); MCKY (LSE) (65%); DIS (NYSE) (65%); JPMC (BRU) (58%); JPM (NYSE) (58%); JPM (LSE) (58%); 8634 (TSE) (58%); BSC (NYSE) (57%); YUM (NYSE) (52%); CISG (NASDAQ) (66%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS522292 REAL ESTATE CREDIT (93%); SIC6162 MORTGAGE BANKERS & LOAN CORRESPONDENTS (93%); NAICS522291 CONSUMER LENDING (73%); NAICS522110 COMMERCIAL BANKING (73%); SIC6399 INSURANCE CARRIERS, NEC (73%); NAICS713110 AMUSEMENT & THEME PARKS (65%); NAICS515112 RADIO STATIONS (65%); NAICS512110 MOTION PICTURE & VIDEO PRODUCTION (65%); NAICS453220 GIFT, NOVELTY & SOUVENIR STORES (65%); SIC6022 STATE COMMERCIAL BANKS (58%); NAICS523110 INVESTMENT BANKING AND SECURITIES DEALING (57%); SIC6211 SECURITY BROKERS, DEALERS, & FLOTATION COMPANIES (57%); NAICS722211 LIMITED-SERVICE RESTAURANTS (52%); SIC5812 EATING PLACES (52%); NAICS523110 INVESTMENT BANKING & SECURITIES DEALING (57%); NAICS551111 OFFICES OF BANK HOLDING COMPANIES (58%); NAICS523999 MISCELLANEOUS FINANCIAL INVESTMENT ACTIVITIES (58%)
PERSON: JAMES E CAYNE (57%); BRUCE WASSERSTEIN (56%); JIMMY CAYNE (57%)
GEOGRAPHIC: WEST USA (79%); KENTUCKY, USA (79%) SOUTH AFRICA (92%); UNITED STATES (79%); INDIA (79%); CHINA (79%)
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GRAPHIC: PHOTO CHART: Lazard price per share drops.
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Irvine Robbins, Ice Cream Entrepreneur And a Maestro of 31 Flavors, Dies at 90
BYLINE: By DENNIS HEVESI
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 25
LENGTH: 802 words
Irvine Robbins, who with his brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, started the Baskin-Robbins chain of ice cream stores -- together concocting quirky flavor combinations with names like Daiquiri Ice, Pink Bubblegum and Here Comes the Fudge -- died on Monday near his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 90.

He died of natural causes, his daughter Marsha Veit said.

The company name could have been Robbins-Baskin. Although it was Mr. Robbins who opened the first store, at the intersection of Adams and Palmer Streets in Glendale, Calif., on Dec. 7, 1945, and it was three years more before he and Mr. Baskin became partners, they took a carefully familial approach to deciding who would come first in the name of what eventually became a vast international enterprise. They flipped a coin.

''They worked closely on everything,'' Ms. Veit said. ''They would come up with ideas for flavors based on what was happening at the time, like Cocoa a Go-Go, when go-go dancers were popular. They would sit in the kitchen tasting, making sure the best ingredients were used.''

The company's famous ''31 flavors'' (essentially one for each day of the month, but actually 34 when chocolate, vanilla and strawberry were included) have varied, numbering more than 1,000 over the years, according to its Web site. They include Nuts to You, Baseball Nut, Rocky Road, Candi-date, Cafe Ole, Huckleberry Finn, chocolate cheesecake, pineapple coconut and Mr. Robbins's personal favorite, Jamoca almond fudge.

One day in 1964, Ms. Veit said, he received a phone call from a reporter for The New York Post, asking what flavor Baskin-Robbins was planning to introduce to celebrate the Beatles' arrival for their appearance on Ed Sullivan's television show. Caught unaware, he came up with Beatlenut, and then scrambled to find an unnamed flavor with nuts in it to match. Two days later, it was in all the company's stores. By then, there were about 650 Baskin-Robbins stores nationwide.

In a 1976 interview in The New York Times, in which he said he ate three or four scoops a day, Mr. Robbins said that Americans had become adventurous in their ice cream choices. ''They're not embarrassed to ask for some of these wild flavors,'' he said. ''I think we've had a little bit to do with making it more acceptable.''

At the time, Mr. Robbins was still chairman of Baskin-Robbins, although the company had been sold to United Fruit in 1967, the year Mr. Baskin died. When Mr. Robbins retired in 1978, the chain had more than 1,600 stores in the United States, Canada, Japan and Belgium. Baskin-Robbins, along with Dunkin' Donuts, is now part of Dunkin' Brands, with 5,800 stores in 34 countries.

''We were in the franchising business before the word was popular,'' Mr. Robbins said.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Dec. 6, 1917, Mr. Robbins was the son of Aaron and Goldie Chmelnitsky Robbins, immigrants from Poland and Russia, respectively. When Mr. Robbins was a child, the family moved to Tacoma, Wash., where his father became a partner in a dairy.

As a teenager, Mr. Robbins worked at the retail store connected to the dairy where, among other products, ice cream was sold at a nickel a cone -- ''a pretty big one, too,'' he said. He soon realized that he could double or triple sales with playful labeling: ''Super Banana Treat'' replaced a sign that said ''three scoops of ice cream, a slice of banana, two kinds of toppings.''

''I got the idea that the way to sell ice cream was not through a grocery store but through a specialty store,'' he said.

After Mr. Robbins graduated from the University of Washington in 1939 and served in the Army in World War II, he was able to test that idea. He cashed in an insurance policy his father had given him as a bar mitzvah present and used the $6,000 to open his first store.

By 1953, the partners sold the eight stores they owned to the managers and began making far more money producing ice cream at a plant in Burbank, Calif. An advertising agency designed the Baskin-Robbins logo, the chocolate-and-cherry-dotted signs and the ''31 flavors'' concept.

Mr. Robbins married Irma Gevurtz in 1942. Besides his wife and his daughter Marsha, of Mount Kisco, N.Y., he is survived by another daughter, Erin Robbins of Grass Valley, Calif.; a son John, of Soquel, Calif.; two sisters, Shirley Familian, who was Mr. Baskin's wife, and Elka Weiner, both of Los Angeles; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Ice cream never melted from Mr. Robbins's mind. When the family lived in Encino, Calif., the house had a soda fountain inside and a swimming pool outside shaped like an ice cream cone. After the company was sold in 1967, Mr. and Mrs. Robbins rented an apartment in Balboa at Newport Beach, to be near the boat they had bought and christened The 32d Flavor.

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SUBJECT: ENTREPRENEURSHIP (90%); RESTAURANTS (89%); DEATHS & OBITUARIES (90%); INTERVIEWS (71%); WEB SITES (50%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (51%)
GEOGRAPHIC: CALIFORNIA, USA (90%) UNITED STATES (90%); NORTH AMERICA (79%); JAPAN (64%); BELGIUM (53%); CANADA (50%)
CATEGORY: Food and Restaurants
Irvine Robbins
LOAD-DATE: May 7, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Irvine Robbins, above left, and Burton Baskin joked outside a store in 1953. Mr. Robbins sampled some of his wares in 1976. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY KORODY/SYGMA

BASKIN-ROBBINS)

DOCUMENT-TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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The New York Times
May 7, 2008 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

The Making Of Yeltsin, His Boldness And Flaws
BYLINE: By BILL KELLER.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, is a former chief of the Moscow bureau.

SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1358 words
YELTSIN

A Life

By Timothy J. Colton

Illustrated. 616 pages. Basic Books. $35.

In the introduction to his biography of Boris N. Yeltsin, Timothy J. Colton lists more than 100 of the similes and analogies that have been applied over the years to Yeltsin, among them martyr and jester, Lincoln and Nixon, Alexander the Great and Ivan the Terrible, Hamlet and Hercules, bear, bulldog and boa constrictor. The wry list is an early signal that Mr. Colton knows he is treading into a subject that has inspired rival mythologies.

To some Western academics and more than a few Russians, Yeltsin's role was almost wholly destructive. Interrupting Mikhail S. Gorbachev's cautious reforms of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, Yeltsin smashed both institutions. He sold off the country's resource-rich industrial heritage to a few moguls in a corrupt insider auction. His economic ''shock therapy'' plunged the country into a period of falling output and runaway inflation that Mr. Colton likens to the Great Depression. He unleashed the army against a mutinous parliament and waged a brutal, scorched-earth war against separatist Chechnya.

For years after Yeltsin crashed onto the political scene, the Gorbachev-infatuated West was overwhelmingly dismissive. Mr. Colton, a professor of government and director of Russian studies at Harvard and the author of a grand history of the city of Moscow, cops to being one of those early dismissers. But he declares up front that his research brought him around to the view that Yeltsin, while flawed and enigmatic, was a hero.

''As a democratizer,'' Mr. Colton writes, ''he is in the company of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel. It is his due even when allowance is made for his blind spots and mistakes.''

Mr. Colton is not the first to undertake Yeltsin's redemption. Leon Aron's ''Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life'' took up the case for Yeltsin in 2000, as his presidency was petering out, and his popularity was at a low ebb. But Mr. Colton has used the extra time to excellent effect. He has mined declassified Kremlin transcripts; fact-checked many memoirs; conducted extensive interviews with participants, including Yeltsin, shortly before his death last year; and synthesized a story that anyone curious about contemporary Russia will find illuminating. And though this is densely researched scholarship, Mr. Colton writes a fluid narrative that only occasionally wanders into the briar patch of academic-speak.

Yeltsin's grievance against the Communists began before he was born, in an all-too-common history of family heartbreak that Mr. Colton pieces together with a good deal of original reporting. The Yeltsins were dispossessed for the bourgeois crime of having built a farm, mill and blacksmithing business. Yeltsin's grandfather died a broken man. His father was charged with the catch-all crime of ''anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda'' for grousing at his job on a construction site, and sent to a forced-labor camp for three years.

When Yeltsin joined the Communist Party, it was not out of devotion to the professed ideals but because a party card was a requirement for promotion to chief engineer in the construction industry. And when he moved into the hierarchy, he was already a man who chafed at party orthodoxy. No radical, he ''nibbled at the edges of what was admissible,'' Mr. Colton writes, pushing for market prices in the local farm bazaars, encouraging entrepreneurial initiative in the workplace, complaining that the top-down system smothered self-reliance.

In his moderation he was at first rather like Mr. Gorbachev, Yeltsin's exact contemporary (the two were born 29 days apart, in 1931), his sponsor for a time, but ultimately his foil and nemesis. Mr. Colton nicely sums up the two men metaphorically: Yeltsin is feline, with an instinct for the great and unexpected leap; Mr. Gorbachev is canine, ''trainable, tied to the known and to the previously rewarded.''

Mr. Gorbachev promoted Yeltsin to be Moscow party boss, but soon came to see him as an impetuous showboat. Yeltsin saw Mr. Gorbachev as a vacillating windbag, and made little effort to hide it. He infuriated his party leader by complaining about Mrs. Gorbachev's meddling in Moscow affairs. They clashed in the Politburo over Yeltsin's populist jibes at the privileges of party leaders.

The decisive break came in October 1987 when Yeltsin, in a disjointed speech to a (closed) party plenum, declared that people were losing faith in reforms and accused Mr. Gorbachev of tolerating a personality cult. Mr. Gorbachev orchestrated a ritual humiliation and demotion, but half a year later the audacious outcast seized a more public moment -- a conference of 5,000 party delegates -- to repeat his broadside, assuring both his permanent estrangement from the party and his status as a popular hero.

Shrewdly, Yeltsin recast himself as the champion of the Russian republic -- the heart of the Soviet Union -- and campaigned for a seat in a new federal Congress of People's Deputies. Mr. Gorbachev chose to enter the congress in an uncontested seat reserved for party leaders. His unwillingness to subject himself to a popular vote (which, at the time, he probably could have won) was, Mr. Colton recognizes, ''a blunder of biblical proportions.'' Yeltsin sailed into the parliament despite the Communists' best efforts, and the tide of credibility had shifted decisively his way.

Mr. Gorbachev's last gambit, shoring up the Soviet leadership with hard-line appointees, backfired when several tried to overthrow him. That ham-handed coup gave Yeltsin his famous tank-top photo op and his ultimate triumph.

Once he won the Kremlin, Yeltsin began drinking heavily. Mr. Colton concludes that while Yeltsin's drinking was a distraction and an embarrassment, it did not critically influence his decisions as president.

''No sensible historian would reduce Ataturk's or Churchill's career to his drinking escapades,'' Mr. Colton writes, generously. The booze did, however, ruin Yeltsin's health; he had at least four heart attacks before bypass surgery.

The last half of the book has Yeltsin confronting the blank slate of post-Communist Russia. His three highly improvisational terms as Russian president were marked by periods of political gridlock, government by decree and constant intrigues, including a near-impeachment. His crash economic program, which Russians joked was all shock and no therapy, was meant to unleash entrepreneurial energy. But it also unleashed colossal avarice and corruption, along with five years of economic misery.

In defense, Mr. Colton writes, ''By the day Yeltsin called it quits in 1999, the cradle of state socialism boasted a market economy of sorts,'' inflation had been subdued, economic growth rebounded.

''Reforming the system from within, as Gorbachev meant to do,'' he writes, ''was a respectable choice. Heading for the exits was a cleaner and better one.''

Within this democratizer -- whom Mr. Colton ranks alongside Mr. Mandela -- there resided a deeply Russian and sometimes ruthless fear of instability. He rebuffed entreaties from his liberal supporters to uproot the K.G.B. Indeed, in his appointments he often reached for young security apparatchiks, men he regarded as possessing ''steel backbone.''

Most of these securocrats he discarded when he grew disenchanted or needed a scapegoat. But the last in the line, Vladimir V. Putin, endured and became Yeltsin's successor because he captured public esteem and loyally stood by Yeltsin through severe tests, including the bloody crushing of Chechnya.

In retirement, Mr. Colton says, Yeltsin confided mounting disapproval as his protege tightened the screws on the press and political opposition. No doubt -- and Yeltsin can't be entirely blamed for his successor (any more than Mr. Mandela could have foreseen how his hand-picked successor would disappoint South Africa). But Mr. Putin is doubly Yeltsin's legacy. Yeltsin anointed him, and the persistent popularity of his hard regime owes something to the stomach-churning ride of Yeltsin-style democracy.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: BOOK REVIEWS (90%); BIOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE (89%); PROFILES & BIOGRAPHIES (89%); POLITICS (74%); POLITICAL PARTIES (74%); ECONOMIC DEPRESSION (73%); ETHNIC & CULTURAL STUDIES (70%); SEPARATISM & SECESSION (66%)
GEOGRAPHIC: MOSCOW, RUSSIA (79%) RUSSIA (91%)
TITLE: Yeltsin: A Life (Book)>; Yeltsin: A Life (Book)>
LOAD-DATE: May 7, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Timothy J. Colton (PHOTOGRAPH BY JERRY BAUER) (pg. E7)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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Paid Notice: Deaths NICHOLS, CICELY
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Classified; Pg. 25
LENGTH: 89 words
NICHOLS--Cicely. CORRECTION: 70, activist, editor, writer, entrepreneur. Her West Village, NYC home was a hub for a broad range of artists, musicians, writers, intellectuals, and activists at the heart of numerous movements. She was a leader in the fight for justice and inspired others to believe in themselves, each other, and their dreams. Memorial: 6:30pm, May 11, Greenwich House Music School, 46 Barrow St. No flowers; please give to cancer research by Dr. Herbert Chen, information: gastrinoma@ aol.com, 608-263-2434. Vote Obama!
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SUBJECT: ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (90%); DEATHS & OBITUARIES (86%); ENDOCRINE SYSTEM DISORDERS (82%); CANCER (51%); MEDICAL RESEARCH (51%); SINGERS & MUSICIANS (87%)
PERSON: BARACK OBAMA (55%)
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May 6, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

POSTINGS RECENT ENTRIES FROM OUR BLOGS
SECTION: Section F; Column 0; Science Desk; POSTINGS RECENT ENTRIES FROM OUR BLOGS; Pg. 10